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As Rochester prepares to celebrate Susan B. Anthony’s 193rd birthday on Feb. 15—while the nation approaches its 250th anniversary—it is worth asking an uncomfortable question: Would Anthony be happy with where we are today?
The honest answer is no.
Anthony devoted her life to securing women’s suffrage, knowing she would not live to see it. It eventually passed in 1920. Yet the full economic and social equality she envisioned remains unfinished—and today, that progress is facing renewed resistance, from courts and political leaders to sexual predators shielded by wealth and influence.
Rochester knows this struggle intimately as the second wave of feminism reshaped this city. When National NOW president Betty Friedan called for the Women’s Strike for Equality on Aug. 26, 1970—the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage—members of Rochester’s fledgling NOW chapter organized a march down Main and Broad streets to the Susan B. Anthony House.
At the time, the house was closed to the public, controlled by the Susan B. Anthony Memorial Inc., and reserved largely for elite social teas. We arrived with teacups, brooms, dustpans—and the press—and symbolically smashed those teacups on the steps, demanding change. And change came. Today, the Anthony House is a public museum undergoing major expansion, a source of pride for Rochester and the nation.
That activism sparked broader transformation. Gannett ended sex-segregated job ads after our lawsuit. Restaurants like the Manhattan and Sibley’s opened their men-only grills following sit-ins. The Rochester Jaycees became national leaders by admitting women as full members. Later, Mona Miller and I founded the Rochester Women’s Network, which grew into the largest women’s networking organization in the country. Women were elected at every level of government, including Louise Slaughter, who went on to become the longest-serving congresswoman and a champion for women’s health research.
Yet today, women’s accomplishments are being erased with alarming boldness. It took me six years to uncover the buried story of Martha Matilda Harper—Rochester’s pioneering female entrepreneur. That erasure is now accelerating nationally, with references to women service members, particularly Harriet Tubman, scrubbed from military and cemetery websites, only partially restored only after public outrage. Women’s accomplishments are “disappearing” or being disparaged as DEI at work.
Despite all our navigational tools, we have lost our way.
As founder of the National Center of Women’s Innovations, I have seen what truthful history can do. When third graders encounter the story of Dr. Gladys West, whose mathematical work made GPS possible, their faces light up. One Black girl said, “Seeing her story means I can achieve anything.”
That is the power Susan B. Anthony believed in. Susan’s sister Mary demanded and eventually was paid equally to male principals. Today, women still are paid less than men for equal work.
Honor her birthday not with nostalgia, but with action: support the Anthony House, demand full and factual history in our schools, support businesses that support equality, and vote for leaders who refuse to whitewash women’s achievements. Rochester has led before. We can—and must—lead again.
Jane Plitt was president of the Genesee Valley Chapter of NOW in Rochester, national executive director of NOW and founder of the National Center of Women’s Innovations. She is also the author of a series of books about Martha Matilda Harper.
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There are many other areas where the question, “Would Susan B. Anthony be happy today?” could be asked besides the role of women in society.
One of the lesser-known, or at least lesser-discussed, aspects of Anthony’s career are her views on immigration. Understandably, she and the other leaders of the women’s suffrage movement took the view that allowing male immigrants literally just off-the-boat to vote (as many states did), while denying native-born women the elective franchise was indefensible. (She of course held the same view regarding the 15th. Amendment which allowed male ex-slaves to vote but ignored women, resulting in the rupture of her alliance with Frederick Douglass).
However, her arguments on immigration also included derogatory remakes about immigrants of a kind that could be embraced today by many a Trumpublican. Indeed her views on ”educated suffrage” went so far as to advocate literacy tests for voting, a test which would have effectively blocked millions of first-generation immigrants (and many ex-slaves who had been denied an education) from voting while in no way advancing the cause of women’s suffrage.
What remains unclear is the extent to which Anthony’s opposition to immigrant voting was an indication of a wider opposition to immigration in general, perhaps driven by the Nativist sentiments so common in the days of her childhood in Massachusetts and New York, or was simply a rhetorical condemnation of the unfairness of states denying women the vote while allowing male immigrant voting. Or perhaps a combination of both?
As a result, let’s rephrase and expand the question to ask, “Would Susan B. Anthony be happy today about the American immigration situation?”